rms which favouring
circumstances and assiduous culture might have developed into free
societies. They exhibit some sense of common interest in common
concerns, little reverence for external authority, and an imperfect
sense of the function and supremacy of the State. Where the division of
property and labour is incomplete there is little division of classes
and of power. Until societies are tried by the complex problems of
civilisation they may escape despotism, as societies that are
undisturbed by religious diversity avoid persecution. In general, the
forms of the patriarchal age failed to resist the growth of absolute
States when the difficulties and temptations of advancing life began to
tell; and with one sovereign exception, which is not within my scope
to-day, it is scarcely possible to trace their survival in the
institutions of later times. Six hundred years before the birth of
Christ absolutism held unbounded sway. Throughout the East it was
propped by the unchanging influence of priests and armies. In the West,
where there were no sacred books requiring trained interpreters, the
priesthood acquired no preponderance, and when the kings were overthrown
their powers passed to aristocracies of birth. What followed, during
many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the
oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The
spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of
the aristocratic poet Theognis, a man of genius and refinement, who
avows that he longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries.
From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in
the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave
new shape and energy to the evil. The tyrants were often men of
surprising capacity and merit, like some of those who, in the fourteenth
century, made themselves lords of Italian cities; but rights secured by
equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere.

From this universal degradation the world was rescued by the most gifted
of the nations. Athens, which like other cities was distracted and
oppressed by a privileged class, avoided violence and appointed Solon to
revise its laws. It was the happiest choice that history records. Solon
was not only the wisest man to be found in Athens, but the most profound
political genius of antiquity; and the easy, bloodless, and pacific
revolution by which he accomplished th